How Emmanuel Carrère Reinvented Nonfiction

Late last October, as American electoral pandemonium was approaching its climax, I was in a living room in Paris where the 59-year-old French writer and filmmaker Emmanuel Carrère was talking about shame. “To write disagreeable things about the self, dishonorable things,” Carrère told me, reclining like an analysand on a black leather couch, “this doesn’t present me with any problems. I have very little shame. There are many things I’ve done or thought that I consider bad, but I don’t feel shame over them because I think that everyone feels they’ve done bad things. I think it does a reader good to see: ‘Oh, he’s the same way. Him too.’

“What’s difficult,” Carrère continued, sitting up, “is that when one writes about oneself, one is obligated to write about other people. And there, as much as one has the right to write absolutely whatever one wants about the self — and once again, for me, that’s not very difficult — to write about others is an enormous problem. The sincerity that you can exhibit with yourself, you have no right to inflict on anyone else.”

Carrère, who has the silhouette of someone half his age but whose face is so deeply grooved that its lines seem carved there, wasn’t speaking abstractly. In the past 17 years, he has become famous in France for writing about other people — a murderer, a Russian fascist, his mother, her father, the women in his romantic life — in each case finding new formal solutions to the problem of writing about the self and others. But Carrère is not without his misgivings about the results.

“It makes me think of a sentence, something absolutely horrible,” Carrère continued. “It was 15 or 20 years ago, in an interview with General Massu of the French Army, who had been accused of torturing men in Algeria, in the war. During the ’50s and ’60s, this highest-ranking general, who had enormous power, had been accused, with good reason, of having tortured many people. In the interview, Massu said, of la gégène — torture with electric prods from a generator — ‘Listen. Don’t exaggerate. The prods? I tried them on myself. It hurts, but not worse than that.’ The nonsense of that statement! What’s atrocious about torture is that someone else is afflicting you, and you don’t know when he will stop. ‘I tried it on myself to see if it hurts. And I stop when it hurts.’ That’s the opposite of torture. That’s called an experience. The simultaneous nonsense and moral ugliness of that sentence!

“To write bad things about yourself,” Carrère went on, leaning back again, “it’s like Massu using the generator on himself. You decide yourself when you’re going to stop. When you write about others, there’s a huge responsibility. For my part, I have used the generator on people other than myself. And that bothers me. I don’t like that idea. I’m not a good man, unfortunately. I would like to be a good man. I admire goodness and virtue most. But I am not very good. I am, however, very moral. Which is to say I know where goodness is, and badness. I do not believe that literature gives you the right to immorality.”

Questions of right and wrong, of kindness and cruelty, of good and evil, animate literary history, so much so that it would be difficult to find a lasting work of narrative art that doesn’t engage, in some essential way, with how we behave and what makes us behave as we do. Carrère’s case has become notable in that history because of how differently he has posed those questions. Since he began his career, in 1982, with a book-length essay on Werner Herzog, a filmmaker who has alternated between fiction and nonfiction, an alternation that Carrère as a writer admires and through his own body of work exhibits, Carrère has managed to renovate the idea of what nonfiction writing can be. Profoundly intimate, historically and philosophically serious but able to cast compulsive narrative spells, Carrère’s books are hybrids, marrying deep reporting to scholarly explorations of theology, philosophy, psychology, personal history and historiography. Though formal innovation tends to preoccupy avant-garde writers and to guarantee a small readership, Carrère’s books — 14 across 36 years, with translations into more than 30 languages — have been best sellers, as popular as they are praised. If Michel Houellebecq is routinely advanced as France’s greatest living writer of fiction, Carrère, whose prose is no less remarkable for its purity and whose vision is no less broad, is widely understood as France’s greatest writer of nonfiction.

Carrère’s priority of frankness has forged, from book to book, new ways of managing to be truthful, new ways of including the first person. Self-conscious approaches to nonfiction narration, those that favor the reportorial “I” in the proceedings, aren’t new, with examples as old as, and not limited to, Daniel Defoe in the 18th century, Thomas De Quincey in the 19th and Joan Didion in the 20th. In an era when nonfiction with a vaguely journalistic foundation has been a thing so mutable that it has been rebranded across three generations as “new journalism,” “gonzo journalism” and “creative nonfiction,” Carrère’s approach still defies category. Even to call his recent books, as Carrère sometimes has, “nonfiction novels” doesn’t do much to clarify what makes them so unusual. Though it’s easy to notice the mechanics of a Carrère book — his characteristic inclusion of himself in the proceedings, his habitual inclusion of the process by which the book in question is being formed — what is genuinely original in Carrère’s work is the sensibility that animates those varied approaches, infused as it is with Carrère’s at-times-skeptical, at-times-maniacal way of thinking, his well-stocked intelligence, his spare, unfussily lyrical prose, his shameproof feed of uncensored interiority, his tireless storytelling energy and his unstinting attempts and, importantly, failures at maintaining sympathy for his subjects.

“To write a book,” Carrère told me, “you’ve got to be persuaded that you’re the only person who could write it.” Some of his books make this claim more obviously than others. Carrère’s latest, “The Kingdom,” which appears in the United States this week, is at once a memoir of his time as a devout Christian and a fictional account of Luke and Paul as they wrote the first books of the Christian story. Or consider his “My Life as a Russian Novel,” from 2007, which tells, in part, the story of Carrère’s mother’s father, a brilliant but depressive Georgian émigré who, failing to integrate into French life after the Russian Revolution, ended up interpreting for the Germans during World War II. One day, he disappeared, not to be seen or heard from again. Carrère’s mother was 15 at the time, and she never spoke of his disappearance or his fate. Carrère sought to tell that story as fully as he could, but it wouldn’t be a Carrère book if, in telling that story, he didn’t also tell the story of the making of the feature documentary he shot in Russia, in 2002 (Carrère has a parallel career as a film and television director and writer), about the town, Kotelnich, a backwater 11 hours from Moscow, where a 75-year-old Hungarian soldier from World War II was discovered 53 years after he fought against the Soviets and, having been taken prisoner, confined to a tiny mental hospital. But in telling that story, the story of the making of the documentary, Carrère also told the story of the relationship he was in at the time he was making that movie, a troubled relationship with a woman of a different social class, a woman to whom he wrote a pornographic letter, one he published in Le Monde, a leading French newspaper, a letter that he didn’t tell her about and that was meant to be an erotic surprise — a surprise that went catastrophically awry, taking with it Carrère’s psychological balance. His unraveling, as documented in the book, is one of the most compelling conjurings of mania a reader is likely to encounter. As improbable as this confluence of elements might seem, they marry into something remarkable, especially given that “My Life as a Russian Novel” ends with yet another open letter, one to Carrère’s mother, about the fact that they had never talked about the darkness that hovered over their family, a darkness that he hoped might be lifted by his telling of this story in the most open way possible: a public way. Given that Carrère’s mother, Hélène Carrère d’Encausse, is arguably the most famous Russian historian in France, a constant presence on French television not merely for her expertise but also in her capacity as the permanent secretary of the Académie Française, the 382-year-old institution founded by Richelieu to safeguard the sanctity and purity of the French language, Carrère’s claim of ambivalence over having used la gégène on other people seems not at all overstated.

While I cannot imagine what it might be like to read the book as his mother, I can imagine, now, what it might be like to live with such a story, and why one way of living with it might be to not want to live with it at all. It is in this way — this way of being supremely frank; this way of combining elements that at first seem cumbersomely heterogeneous but that turn out to be meaningfully conjoined — that Carrère has managed to write one masterpiece after another, books preoccupied with the violence that can invade our lives without warning or appeal, books that are, themselves, at times, acts of violence against that violence.

“The best part of a writer’s biography,” Vladimir Nabokov told Vogue magazine, in 1969, “is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.” Though Nabokov’s own story was not without its dramatic plot points, how he went from writing a negligible first novel called “Mary” to, 30 years later, a classic of world literature, “Lolita,” is the richer part of his story because it’s a story that can be told only about him.

The same is true of Carrère. To date, you can divide his career into neat halves, the first preoccupied with fiction and the second devoted to nonfiction. He published five novels before his 40th birthday (four of them in his 20s), to increasing acclaim, all written in the third person. Though Carrère speaks ruefully of most of them — the autobiographical first novel that drew heavily if surreally on his French military-service experience in Indonesia where he taught old Chinese ladies to speak French and took every drug he could find; the second, which, set around the famous night in the summer of 1816 when Mary Shelley came up with the Frankenstein story, he finds as overdone as the first; and the fourth, which he just says he doesn’t like at all — two retain his affection: “The Mustache” (1986) and “Class Trip” (1995). Each is a short, sharp shock of a book, running about 150 pages and building to a dreadful end involving violence, physical and psychological.

Carrère in Paris, in January.Credit
Gueorgui Pinkhassov/Magnum, for The New York Times

Carrère’s appreciation of these two short books is somewhat melancholy, however, in that he loves his work in this mode: short novels in the third person from which nothing can be removed. For, when discussing the writing he admires, though he mentions Rousseau’s “Confessions” and Montaigne’s “Essays” — he can’t resist rising from the couch to look up Montaigne’s introductory “To the reader” on his iPad and then to read it aloud with a kind of wonder as if he’d just discovered it — he mostly talks about the fiction he loves: Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot” (“The narrative propulsion in those first 300 pages is absolutely incredible”); Wharton’s “Ethan Frome” and James’s “The Turn of the Screw,” favorites for their compression; “War and Peace” (“Fiction’s largest vision of the world”); the ending of “Anna Karenina” (“Habitually we say that the end isn’t very good. It touches me a great deal, the life of Kitty and Levin. I find it magnificent. A happiness like that is one I aspire to in life”); and, most of all, how “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” remains a perpetual goad to him as a writer (“In the dream of books one would like to imitate, it is one”). That Carrère stopped writing novels, then, has nothing to do with his preferences as a reader or a writer. Carrère would still like to write pure fiction.

Since that first half of his writing life ended, Carrère has published five works of book-length narrative nonfiction, all written in the first person, each of which is unlike the other. How the first and second parts of this career fit together or, if you like, break apart, helps to explain how Carrère has managed to find his way to his uniqueness. The pivot point in that evolution was Carrère’s writing of “The Adversary,” his book about Jean-Claude Romand, a Frenchman who for 18 years pretended first to be a medical student and then a doctor at the World Health Organization. In an effort to hide his secret as it began to unravel — he was embezzling large sums to enable his deceit — Romand murdered his immediate family: wife, two children, his parents, even their dog. Carrère, like everyone else in France in 1993, was horrified by this crime, and, having enjoyed a thriving journalistic career in parallel to his novelistic one, he produced a taut, third-person report of the trial and the circus around it. Despite feeling steadily worse that as a father of two young sons, he would spend so much time writing about a man who murdered his children, Carrère tried to make a book of it. His model was “In Cold Blood,” a book he admires, a book written in the third person, a book he takes issue with too. As he told The Paris Review, in 2013:

The book, which is a masterpiece, rests on a lie by omission that seems to me morally hideous. The whole last part of the book is about the years the two criminals spent in prison, and during those years, the one main person in their lives was Capote. Nevertheless, he erased himself from the book. And he did so for a simple reason, which was that what he had to say was completely unsayable — he had developed a friendship with the two men. He spent his time telling them that he was going to get them the best lawyers, that he was working to get them a stay of execution, when in fact he was lighting candles in the church in the hopes that they would be hanged because he knew that was the only satisfactory ending to his book. It’s a level of moral discomfort almost without equal in literature, and I don’t think it is too psychologically far-fetched to say that the reason he never really wrote much else is related to the monstrous and justified guilt that his masterpiece inspired in him.

Carrère spent six years trying to manage the task of writing a French “In Cold Blood,” to write the story of this hideous crime from multiple points of view, to try to get into everyone’s head the way a novelist would, to imaginatively identify. And he failed, generating, he says, many hundreds of pages he was unable to use. Two years into that time, Carrère wrote his final short novel, “Class Trip,” one obliquely related, in its abject theme, to Romand’s violence. But six years passed, “six years,” Carrère has said, “of my life circling this story like a hyena,” six years during which this very productive writer published only 150 pages. He just couldn’t figure out how to finish the Romand story. Before he put it aside, he wrote himself what he calls a memo about what he tried to do, as a way of getting some closure on the wreck that the project had made of his life and his career. The memo began:

On the Saturday morning of January 9, 1993, while Jean-Claude Romand was killing his wife and children, I was with mine in a parent-teacher meeting at the school attended by Gabriel, our eldest son. He was 5 years old, the same age as Antoine Romand. Then we went to have lunch with my parents, as Jean-Claude Romand did with his, whom he killed after their meal.

“I’m not an idiot,” Carrère has said about the moment after he wrote those lines. “I very quickly realized that this impossible book to write was now becoming possible, that it was practically writing itself, now that I had accepted writing it in the first person. ... Others are a black box, especially someone as enigmatic as Romand. I understood that the only way to approach it was to consent to go into the only black box I do have access to, which is me.”

In the work that followed “The Adversary,” Carrère has continued to present himself presenting the lives of others. Though that might sound narcissistic, it has the upending feeling, for the reader, of humility in action. There’s a reason for this. Carrère told a great story to The Paris Review about the source of that humility:

A little girl once said something in front of me that I just loved. She had misbehaved and her mother was scolding her, saying, “But put yourself in other people’s position!” And the little girl answered, “But if I put myself in their position, where do they go?” I have often thought of that since I started writing these kinds of “nonfiction” books, the rules and moral imperatives of which I was starting to become acquainted with. I don’t think you can put yourself in other people’s positions. Nor should you. All you can do is occupy your own, as fully as possible, and say that you are trying to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, but say it’s you who’s imagining it, and that’s all.

So this is Carrère’s idea of nonfiction: to occupy your own position as fully as possible. His quotes around “nonfiction” are interesting. They suggest a certain level of suspicion over the sufficiency of the label, and I see Carrère-the-novelist as having inserted them. Carrère’s thinking here about what nonfiction does is in useful opposition to a prevailing idea about fiction, of which David Foster Wallace gave perhaps the most widely circulated explanation. As Wallace said in a 1993 interview:

I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art for is an experience of suffering, necessarily a vicarious experience, more like a sort of ‘generalization’ of suffering. ... We all suffer alone in the real world; true empathy’s impossible. But if a piece of fiction can allow us imaginatively to identify with a character’s pain, we might then also more easily conceive of others identifying with our own. This is nourishing, redemptive; we become less alone inside.

Fiction, in Wallace’s view, provides the reader with consolation because of its performance of empathy — of what it would be like to be understood. Carrère’s work suggests that we might come to nonfiction not to imagine ourselves being understood, not to feel less alone but to actively imagine understanding and understanding’s limits. It is in this way that his books display how thinking about other people feels: lonely, but nourishingly so.

Carrère’s most profound exploration of that kind of nourishing aloneness came, in part, out of a 2004 vacation in Sri Lanka with his son, his girlfriend and her son. One morning — after Carrère had petitioned them all to move from their bungalow on a cliff down to a guesthouse on the beach but was outvoted, a decision that saved their lives; a morning when they had planned to go snorkeling but Carrère’s son decided he didn’t want to, which also saved their lives — the tsunami struck, killing at least a quarter million people in more than five countries. After the wave hit, as emergency services worked, Carrère met many people who had lost loved ones and became close to a family whose 4-year-old daughter, Juliette, had been lost in the disaster. “Lives Other Than My Own” details, in part, the harrowing search by his new friends for their daughter’s body. But it also pursues the story of his girlfriend’s sister, also named Juliette, a regional debt-court judge, after she finds out she has cancer. And the pursuit of that story, in turn, tells the story of Juliette’s friendship with her fellow judge, Étienne, and his regard for Juliette, who, like Étienne, was crippled in adolescence by cancer. Through these twinnings, of names, of fates, Carrère pursues a story about loss — loss of children, loss of mothers, of the way fate vandalizes our lives — that ends up being a story about what it means to have something truly dear in your hands.

There’s an amazing little moment in the book that gets at what Carrère is able to do. Carrère is just awaking to the devastation of the tsunami in Sri Lanka, and he is walking around meeting people who are seeking their loved ones in vain. He comes upon an English tourist, “an overweight middle-aged Englishwoman with short hair who had lost her girlfriend”:

I imagined the two of them getting on in years, living in a lovingly tended house in an English town, taking part in its social life, going on a yearly trip to some distant country, putting together their photo albums. ... All that shattered. The survivor’s return; the empty house. Each woman’s mug with her name on it, one of them forever forlorn. And this heavy woman, sitting slumped at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, weeping, telling herself that she’s all alone now and will be until she dies.

“Among the many astonishing passages that stand out in ‘Lives Other Than My Own,’ ” Michel Houellebecq says, in a forthcoming essay of his on Carrère that was provided to The Times by his agent, “the most heartbreaking for me is about the old English lesbian who has just lost her companion in the catastrophe. Carrère did in fact meet this woman during the holidays in Sri Lanka that ended so terribly; but he imagined the mugs. This seems to me the margin of invention Carrère finds in this book where ‘everything is true.’ It’s not insignificant. Because they’re not nothing, these mugs. It was exactly at the moment of the mugs, I remember, that I burst into tears, and that I had to put the book down, unable, for a few minutes, to continue reading.”

The role of the witness to catastrophe is a central one in our lives: How are we to imagine the pain of others? In religion, theodicy is the branch of writing that tries to explain how a perfect god would nonetheless make our lives so painful. One way of seeing Carrère’s body of work is to present that “problem of evil.” But Houellebecq sees Carrère doing something very different and very radical.

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“Good exists, it exists absolutely, just as much as evil,” Houellebecq explained. “And it’s this existence — absolutely against every natural law, this counterproductive existence from a biological point of view — which poses the real problem. And it is this problem of goodness, the only real problem, that Emmanuel Carrère poses in the most beautiful pages of his books.”

Carrère’s “The Kingdom,” which tells the story of the founding of Christianity, pushes deeply into this problem of goodness, the hunger of the human animal to find connection to others and, through connection, communion. At 630 pages in its French edition, it is driven by the story of Carrère’s earlier pursuit of Christianity more than two decades ago, when, during a period of personal anguish — unable to write, mired in a failing marriage and seeking relief from depression — he became a devout Christian, one who went to church daily, wrote dozens of journals devoted to his verse-by-verse study of the Gospel of John, prayed fervently and, after three or four years, lost his way again, his belief fading. In telling that story, Carrère also narrates a study of the written histories of the early Christian church in the years following the death of Jesus Christ, these contradictory early records with more gaps in the narrative than narrative. And, to make sense of what doesn’t make sense — how four narratives of the death of a man who spoke in riddles and, 2,000 years later, is worshiped as God by two billion people — Carrère also writes a fictional account of the Apostles Luke and Paul as they began their missionary work, an account whose fictionality fills in the huge gaps in the record, to the end of trying to understand how one could tell such a story in such a way that it would captivate all of humanity for all time. Thus “The Kingdom” becomes a story of the telling of the world’s most famous story and an inquiry into how storytelling works that pushes, not infrequently, against the limits of what can be said.

Carrère himself sees the book as a kind of masterpiece, not in an arrogant way but in the manner of a fine carpenter who, for five years, after compulsively rubbing coat after coat of mineral oil into a long-completed cherry table, recognizes, not without some surprise, that it glows with inner light. Carrère told me that “The Kingdom” was a book he loved working on, a book he didn’t want to stop writing, a book that, he hoped, would mark the end of that second part of his creative life and usher in a third. The problem now was that, three years having passed since he finished writing it, no new era had been ushered in, and “The Kingdom” had come to feel, to Carrère, like a capstone to a writing life that he was desperate — and in anguish at being unable — to continue. He has once again been unable to write a book that works, whether fiction or nonfiction. He has taken on some journalistic assignments, journalism always having been a useful and meaningful way for Carrère, when blocked, to engage with the world. But when I saw him, he was in a kind of agony. Once again, he was mired in depression.

“I’ve lived a mostly privileged life,” Carrère told me. “For the most part I’m lucky: I never had any real money problems, professionally I knew some success fairly quickly, I’m in good health. At the same time, the thing I’ve carried in my life that’s a little heavy is a tendency to depression. Occasionally, there are years that aren’t exposed to it. Then it comes back. The best remedy to it is work, and when work isn’t there — and when my sense is that work isn’t possible — there’s great fragility as a result.”

Carrère was very much in that fragile state when we spoke. His writerly purgatory was also a domestic one: Of late, he said, he has had the impression that he has no idea where he’s living. He has not been living at home, he and his wife having recently sold their apartment and bought a new one that isn’t yet habitable and that left him occupying an absent friend’s place, one in which there wasn’t the least trace of life, anyone’s life — no books, no pictures, no chosen anything: no nothing — and that had, therefore, a sinister air of vacancy. The vaguely creepy ambience of that objectively pleasant apartment into which Carrère welcomed me — large windows facing a leafy courtyard; two floors — was further amplified by the presence of a huge leather couch at its center, a couch that seemed somehow forlorn, abandoned, a huge dog of a couch waiting miserably for its owner to return.

The reason I belabor this point of feeling is to try to get across the atmosphere of spending time with Carrère that day and the next. “Others are a black box,” Carrère said, and yet that black box does sometimes give off a black light that, in certain moments, though it can’t be seen, can be felt. Carrère, who is nothing if not exquisitely polite and who tries at every turn to express himself with precision and care and frankness and good cheer, did his best to be a good host, offering tea, offering himself as much as he could. But in retrospect, that first day of conversation was heartbreaking: During those first hours when he presented as a very cheerful guy, he was, in fact, suffering terribly.

After two hours of talk in that strangely grim-cheerful apartment, talk that centered on the various kinds of art Carrère admires — in sculpture (Michelangelo’s “Pietà Rondanini”: “It’s a thing that’s utterly stupefying because of the abandon, as if the body of Christ were falling. You sense the weight. It’s staggering”) and music (Dylan and Leonard Cohen are important to him) — we had lunch and we talked about painted portraits. As there was a Rembrandt show on and as Carrère said he loved Rembrandt (“It’s a bit tired to say this but if there is a painting where you have the impression that you’re seeing the soul of the person painted, it’s really Rembrandt”), we decided to go to the show after lunch. Carrère asked me if it would be O.K. if we went there on his scooter and gave me a helmet and off we went. It was a pretty, sunny day in Paris, and as we putted forward through the busy streets, Carrère drove carefully, perhaps a little too carefully, in that there was a tremendous amount of unexpected braking, and I found, as I clutched the bar on the back of the bike with both hands, that my hugely helmeted head kept colliding with the rear of Carrère’s helmet. I tried very hard not to let my helmet collide with his, and whether through a deficit of core strength or passengerial inexperience, it kept happening. Bonk; putt-putt-putt bonk; bonk; putt-putt-putt-putt bonk. And the thought I had was: This would be a lot easier if we were close friends, brothers, and it were natural to rest against him. And of course, I didn’t do this, because it would have been awkward for an American reporter to embrace his just-met subject on the back of scooter as we bumbled down a Paris boulevard. But the feeling that seized me, and it was oddly powerful, was that I should, that it wouldn’t be weird to hold onto this stranger. That everything would be a lot better if I did, if I just reached out and held on.

The Rembrandt show was at the Musée Jacquemart-André, a little museum with a big line through which Carrère and I made our way, several people we passed discretely doing the head nod and another unselfconsciously pointing. On the second floor of the not-so-little ornate mansion with its mirrored and gilded vaulted spaces, its grand proportions and delicate details, we found the show, which was billed as “Rembrandt: Intime.” We passed some of his student works, outdoor scenes of knights standing around, terrible paintings, done when he was 20 (“It’s good to tell yourself,” Carrère said, “when you begin to learn a skill you do things like this and afterward, later, you might be able to do something”); another painting, so vague, Carrère said, “you can’t even tell what he’s trying to paint”; and a self-portrait, one of two in the show (“Funny that Rembrandt made some of the loveliest portraits in the world and he’s not a very attractive man”); and then we came upon a portrait of a white-bearded St. Paul sitting at his desk, aglow with light as if from an unseen candle (“Older than in my imagination. Late 50s in mine and more like early 80s here”). And then we were before two different states of Rembrandt’s famous etching of Christ on the cross, surrounded by thieves. The ur-image of the Passion, passion from the Latin, pati, to suffer. The two etchings were side by side, the one on the left bright and full of detail, as though bathed in sunlight. The one on the right was dark, as though the crucifixion had taken place not on a hill but in a cave, the light streaming in from a crack in the surface of the earth. Neither was truly finished, and each varied in the details that Rembrandt worked into the print. I asked which Carrère preferred.

“I prefer this one,” he said, pointing to the one on the left. “This is too dark.”

Many shelves of books have explored the route from darkness to light, faithlessness to faith. It’s a whole genre, and it begins with one of Carrère’s favorite books, Augustine’s “Confessions.” Carrère’s own is the only one I know in the tradition that convincingly sketches a state of faithlessness that becomes one of devotion and then just as plausibly explains the way that devotion degrades into doubt. Much of this is metaphysically heady, but what is most striking in Carrère’s account is how palpable and physical it is too, particularly in those sections — the meat of Carrère’s book — that describe his attempts to tell the stories of Luke and Paul. If this sounds like historical fiction, I can’t really say that it feels that way. It feels like reportage, with a reporter’s keen attention to fact, to what happened and what it looked like. And Carrère has no ambition to write historical fiction. As he notes in “The Kingdom”: “While some people are fully able to put on a straight face and get characters from Antiquity dressed in togas and skirts to say things like ‘Salve Paulus, come with me to the atrium,’ I can’t. That’s the problem with historical novels, and even more with those set in Ancient Rome: I can’t help being reminded of ‘A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.’ ” Carrère’s telling of these moments from the past feels, instead, like a bearing witness.

As a former believer and now a nonbeliever, Carrère, seeking answers, sets out, in “The Kingdom,” to tell the story of the storytellers. He is trying to understand what it takes to be able to tell a story, any story. And what he finds, once again, is that you have to find your role in it. That need to understand the role you have in the larger human story is at the heart of this beautiful, difficult book. Difficult not in form but in feeling, “The Kingdom” manages to get at the contradictions of what we call intimacy.

“The Kingdom” doesn’t have a plot; it has an emotional shuttle that takes the reader through stations of feeling. Late in the book, Carrère decides to go to a Christian retreat, one based around a story of the Last Supper in Luke, that of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, men shocked that he is debasing himself in this way. “He kneels before Peter, who protests: ‘Master, are you going to wash my feet?’ Jesus answers: ‘What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.’ ” So Carrère goes to a retreat where everyone will do as Jesus did, washing one another’s feet, where some of the participants are adults with various degrees of mental impairment. Carrère washes one man’s feet:

I look at these feet, don’t know what to think. It’s really very strange to wash the feet of a perfect stranger. I’m reminded of a sentence by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas ... about the human face which, the moment you see it, forbids killing…. [B]ut it’s even more true for people’s feet. Feet are even poorer, even more vulnerable, there’s nothing more vulnerable: the child in each of us. And all the while finding it all a bit embarrassing, I find it beautiful that people get together to do just that, to get as close as possible to the poorest thing in the world and in them. I think that that is Christianity.

Which, Carrère admits, is a nice intellectual response to a physical experience, but hardly a matter of being swept away by faith and love. And so when the guitar playing starts, and the dancing, Carrère is pretty much done with the experience and a little embarrassed at his cravenness in using this retreat as a way to reconnect with his past life.

And then something happens, something I won’t describe here, not because I think that doing so spoils the plot but rather because it is so typical of the way that Carrère’s books defy expectation and precisely the thing that Carrère’s gift for frankness grants, to him and to us. Suddenly at the end of an exploration of a kind of darkness, the darkness of a lived life and its struggles, a moment of revelation occurs in which those struggles are revealed to be not at all what we supposed they were. Like the ending of “Anna Karenina” that Carrère so loves, in which the wrong choices lead to depression and death, a couple make their own choices that lead to new life, to the birth of a child, a birth about which Levin feels conflicted and about which he has thoughts that he does not, and will not, share with his wife, only with us via the novelist’s ability to unveil them. This sort of revelation — small but in a life, huge — is one of the very special things about Carrère’s work: how his books, at their ends, document what, hitherto in literature as in life, remains hidden. This consistent shift to small, hard revelation at the end of his books, is the most difficult thing to characterize, because the effect of these endings is produced through the accumulation of what precedes them, the tens of thousands of choices that lead the reader to them.

It’s much easier to say that Carrère writes about darkness, about tragedy, about villainy, murder, sorrow and loss, about tortured people and torturers, with the torturer sometimes himself. But to leave it there would be perfectly wrong. Carrère’s true subject isn’t evil, but rapture, its precarious presence in our lives; how it disappears, how we become blind to it, how we seek it, how we become its prey and how, if we are fortunate, it at last catches up to us. However preoccupied Carrère is with loss and violence and pain, his books move to endings that earn a space of joy. They are, for lack of a better term, happy endings, but happy endings that feel not like tricks but truths. They are written by someone who knows precisely what they cost.

Wyatt Mason is a contributing writer for the magazine and teaches at Bard College. He last wrote a Letter of Recommendation for audiobooks read by the author.

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A version of this article appears in print on March 5, 2017, on Page MM52 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Telling the Truth. Today's Paper|Subscribe